Sexual Violence Cases Tripled over Last Year in Russia's Belgorod Oblast Neighboring Ukraine

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 5 – The Russian interior ministry has reported that sexual violence rose sharply in Belgorod Oblast, which is on the border with Ukraine and where there are many Russian soldiers involved with Putin’s war in Ukraine, in 2022 and 2023, fell slightly in 2024 and then tripled in 2025.

            This trend has attracted widespread attention from independent Russian media (verstka.media/belgorodskaya-oblast-lider-sredi-regionov-rossii-po-chislu-iznasilovanij-v-2025-godu, meduza.io/feature/2026/02/05/belgorodskaya-oblast-lider-po-chislu-zaregistrirovannyh-iznasilovaniy and t.me/tochno_st/752).

            But the Russian government has stopped publishing the data that would be needed to make a definitive diagnosis of why this is happening. Detailed statistics about sexual violence cases stopped being published in 2022, conviction data ended in 2024, and court rulings in such cases are classified and unavailable to researchers.

            The independent researchers say that it is likely that the amount of sexual violence in Belgorod is related to the fact that there are a disproportionate number of Russian men who are being prepared for combat in Ukraine. But they acknowledge that this can’t be conclusively proved because there have not been similar increases in such crimes in other border regions.

            Regional government experts suggest that the rise in numbers over the last several decades there what they call “multi-episode crimes,” such as abuse within families that often a continues for a long time (media.mvd.ru/files/application/5422615). But that explanation calls attention to the fact that many of the victims of such crimes in Belgorod.

            Indeed, according to interior ministry sources, 42 percent of the victims of such crimes were children, a figure that rose to 66 percent in 2023, the first full year of Putin’s expanded war and the last for which such data are available (media.mvd.ru/files/application/5958851). However that may be, many will blame the war for this rise and fear the return of veterans.